Roundup to Christ

The objection

"Truth is relative. Different cultures, different answers." You hear it in Japan and in America alike, and when the talk turns to religion it is tempting to end things with "that's true for you, not for me."

It sounds humble and tolerant. Nobody pushes anything on anybody. So anyone who says there is absolute truth can come across as arrogant.

The book's answer

The book starts by testing the claim itself. "There is no absolute truth" is offered as an absolute truth. It saws off the branch it sits on: it is self-defeating. Someone who says "truth can't be known" is claiming to know at least that.

Then it points to the laws of physics. Gravity works the same in Tokyo and in Tombstone, for believers and skeptics. Touch a hot stove and you get burned in every culture. Truth is discovered, not invented, and the book argues that moral and spiritual truth is the same way: it exists apart from our preferences.

On tolerance: tolerance does not mean every view is correct. It means treating people who disagree with you with respect, and the very claim "we ought to be tolerant" assumes a moral truth that applies to everyone. If truth exists, the book says, the next question is which claims are true. Rider to rider: nobody heads into the desert without reading the map.

The evidence

Logic itself is the first piece of evidence. The law of non-contradiction (a thing can't be both true and false in the same sense at the same time) is used by everyone who argues, including the person arguing that truth is relative. You can't deny it without using it.

Daily life backs that up. Banks, doctors, pilots and courts all run on the assumption that some statements are simply true and others false. Nobody accepts "that's true for you" from a pharmacist reading a dosage. The book's point is that we already live as if truth exists; the question is whether we'll be consistent about it when the topic is God.

How Geisler & Turek build it: they treat truth like the ground a ranch is built on. If you can't say anything is true, you can't say any religion, including atheism, is false. So they start here, with the self-defeating nature of relativism, before they ever mention God, and every later step stands on this one.

On the trail: which path actually leads home isn't a matter of taste. The map, the stars and the lay of the land tell you. That's why it's worth asking what's really true about faith, too.

The objection

The objection: "Science explains everything. Maybe the universe has always been here, so there's no need to bring God into it."

And the old follow-up: "If God made the universe, who made God?"

The book's answer

The book's argument is simple. Everything that has a beginning has a cause. The universe had a beginning. So the universe has a cause. The key is the second step, and the book sums up the evidence with the acronym SURGE.

S, the Second Law of Thermodynamics: usable energy keeps running down, so an eternal universe would already have burned out. U, the Universe is expanding: since Hubble's observations in the 1920s we've known it keeps spreading out, and running the film backward leads to a beginning. R, Radiation from the big bang: the cosmic background radiation, found by accident in 1965, is read as the afterglow of that beginning. G, Great galaxy seeds: in 1992 the COBE satellite found tiny temperature ripples in that radiation, the seeds galaxies later grew from. E, Einstein's general relativity: it points to a beginning of time, space and matter.

So what kind of cause? A cause of time, space and matter themselves would have to be outside time, spaceless, immaterial, enormously powerful, and personal, since it chose to bring a universe into being. As for "who made God," the book answers that only things with a beginning need a cause: the universe had one, God did not. And to "it came from a quantum vacuum," it replies that a vacuum full of energy and governed by laws is something, not nothing.

The evidence

The beginning of the universe is mainstream science, not a church idea. Georges Lemaître proposed an expanding universe in 1927, Edwin Hubble's observations in 1929 backed it up, and Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson's 1965 discovery of the cosmic background radiation earned them the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics. COBE's 1992 maps added the ripples.

In 2003 physicists Arvind Borde, Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin published a theorem showing that a universe which has, on average, been expanding cannot be extended infinitely into the past. Scientists still argue over what that boundary means, but the long-held idea of a universe with no beginning has had a hard ride. The book's conclusion is that whatever started it stands outside time, space and matter.

How Geisler & Turek build it: they keep the argument to three short lines and then spend their effort on the evidence for the middle one, because that's the step a skeptic would push on. Their answer to "who made God?" is that the argument applies only to things that begin to exist; a cause outside time didn't begin, so it doesn't need a maker.

On the trail: find fresh tracks at dawn and you know someone came through. If the universe carries the tracks of a beginning, it's plain cowboy sense to ask who started it.

The objection

The objection: "Things only look designed. Chance and natural selection did the work, and plugging God into what we don't know yet is a 'God of the gaps.'"

The book's answer

The book starts with the fine-tuning of the universe. Many physicists have pointed out that if constants such as the strength of gravity or the expansion rate of the universe were even slightly different, life could not exist. The book compares it to a house made ready for its guests.

Then first life. Even the simplest living thing carries a huge amount of information in its DNA. The book compares DNA to a written message: find "Taro ♥ Hanako" in the sand and you assume someone wrote it, not the waves. As far as we know, only intelligence produces meaningful information.

It also presents biochemist Michael Behe's idea of irreducible complexity: systems like the bacterial flagellum's motor stop working if one part is missing, which the book argues is hard to explain by small step-by-step changes. A mousetrap with no spring, or no base, catches nothing.

To the "God of the gaps" charge, the book answers that this is not an argument from what we don't know but from what we do know: the only cause we've seen produce information and complex machines is intelligence, the same way an archaeologist infers a human hand from an arrowhead. The book also challenges large-scale evolution (macroevolution); that is debated, and we present it here as the book's position.

The evidence

Physicists across the spectrum talk about fine-tuning. Astronomer Martin Rees, who is not arguing for God, built his book Just Six Numbers (1999) around a handful of physical constants that, changed slightly, would leave a universe with no stars or chemistry. The debate is over the explanation (design, chance, or a multiverse), not over whether the tuning is striking.

Life's origin is the same story. The 1953 Miller–Urey experiment produced amino acids, but no lab has produced a living cell from non-living chemicals. DNA stores instructions in a four-letter chemical code, and the book argues that in every case we know of, coded information comes from a mind. Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box (1996) pointed to machines like the bacterial flagellum; critics dispute his conclusion, and the book asks the reader to weigh both sides.

How Geisler & Turek build it: they argue that in normal life, we infer intelligence when we see specified information, the way you'd assume a person wrote "Ride on" in the sand rather than the wind. They apply that same everyday reasoning to the fine-tuned constants and to DNA, and ask why it should be switched off only when the conclusion is God.

On the trail: look at a well-made saddle or a pair of boots that fit just right and you can feel the craftsman's hand. Anyone who knows Japan's craft traditions knows the weight of the word design.

The objection

The objection: "Right and wrong come from society or evolution. People can be good without God." And the heaviest question of all: "If God exists, why is there evil?"

The book's answer

The book grants up front that people who don't believe in God can be good people. The question isn't whether you can be good, but where the standard of good comes from.

Everyone knows that torturing children for fun is wrong. When someone cheats us we say "that's not fair!" and appeal to a standard we expect them to know too. The book argues that if there is a moral law written on the human heart, there is a Moral Lawgiver.

If society decides, then we could never say a society's slavery or discrimination was wrong; we need a yardstick outside any society to compare them. As for evolution, the book answers that it may describe how we behave, but it can't tell us how we ought to.

On evil, the book points out that calling something evil assumes a standard of good, just as you only know a line is crooked if you know what straight is. And Christianity doesn't make light of evil: the heart of its story is God taking suffering on Himself at the cross to defeat it.

The evidence

C. S. Lewis opened Mere Christianity with the evidence of a quarrel: people say "that's not fair" and expect the other person to know what they mean. Across cultures, some things, like torturing a child for fun, are condemned everywhere. We can disagree over details and still notice we're arguing against a shared standard.

History gives a sharper example. At Nuremberg after World War II, Nazi officials were tried for crimes they had committed under their own nation's laws. The court judged them by a standard above any one country. The book's question: if morality is only culture or opinion, what was that standard, and who wrote it?

How Geisler & Turek build it: they separate knowing right and wrong from the source of right and wrong. An atheist can be a good neighbor, they say; the question is what makes "good" more than a preference. Their claim is that a universal moral law needs a moral lawgiver, and that our sense of justice is a pointer to one.

On the trail: the Code of the West and bushido are both codes for how a person ought to live. If a code like that carries real weight, the book asks, who gave it?

The objection

The objection: "Natural laws can't be broken; miracles are old superstition." Philosopher David Hume's argument is the usual one: reports of miracles always lose to our uniform experience of nature.

The book's answer

The book's first answer is about order. If God exists, miracles are possible: for the One who made the universe from nothing, acting inside it is no stretch. So only someone who has already shown there is no God can rule miracles out from the start.

To Hume, the book replies that evidence should be weighed, not just counted. If we only believe what happens all the time, we couldn't believe one-time events like the beginning of the universe or the origin of life. Anyone who's watched a rodeo knows not every ride goes the way the last hundred did.

It also notes that science is built to study regular, repeatable events. One-time events call for the methods of a courtroom or a historian: evidence and testimony. On this view a miracle doesn't break natural law; it's a new cause stepping into the picture.

The evidence

The modern case against miracles goes back to David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), which argued that uniform experience always outweighs a miracle report. The book answers that this rules miracles out before looking at the evidence for any one of them: it's a verdict reached before the trial.

Scientific laws describe what normally happens when nothing outside the system steps in. If you drop a ball it falls, unless someone catches it; catching the ball doesn't break gravity. If the argument in point 2 holds and a Creator exists, then the One who made nature acting within it is no more impossible than a rancher opening a gate he built.

How Geisler & Turek build it: miracles are the hinge between the first and second halves of the book. Once points 2 to 4 point to a Creator, they argue, miracles stop being impossible and become a question of evidence, and they turn to historical evidence that could confirm a message from God.

On the trail: the old hands know there are days when 'the way it always goes' doesn't hold. What matters is looking square at the evidence of what happened.

The objection

The objection: "The Bible is a centuries-long game of telephone, and it was written by believers, so it's biased."

The book's answer

The book looks first at timing. Paul's letters were written within a few decades of Jesus' death, and 1 Corinthians 15 quotes a creed that goes back earlier still. Legends take time to grow, and here eyewitnesses were still alive.

Then manuscripts. The New Testament survives in thousands of Greek manuscripts alone, far more than other ancient works such as Homer or the Roman historians, and some are close in time to the originals. Unlike a game of telephone, comparing many independent copies lets scholars rebuild the original text with high accuracy.

The book also points to the marks of eyewitness writing: real places, names and small details of the time, and embarrassing details left in. The disciples often don't get it, Peter denies Jesus three times, and the first witnesses to the empty tomb were women, whose testimony counted for little back then. Nobody making up a story writes it that way.

To "they were believers," the book answers that they believed because of what they saw, and that non-Christian ancient writers such as Josephus and Tacitus also mention Jesus and his execution.

The evidence

The numbers on the manuscripts are well documented: more than 5,000 Greek New Testament manuscripts or fragments survive, plus thousands in early translations. For comparison, the works of Roman historians like Tacitus survive in only a few manuscripts. The John Rylands fragment of John's Gospel (P52), held in Manchester, is usually dated to the first half of the 2nd century.

Archaeology has repeatedly checked Luke's details. He calls Thessalonica's officials "politarchs", a title once thought odd, and inscriptions using that title have since been found there. Paul's letter 1 Corinthians, which most scholars, skeptics included, date to the mid-50s AD, already records the core claims about Jesus. That's within living memory of the events, which matters for whether legend had time to grow.

Not every witness is friendly. Several ancient writers who had no stake in Christianity mention it. The Roman historian Tacitus (Annals 15.44, early 2nd century) writes that "Christus" was executed under Pontius Pilate in Tiberius' reign. Pliny the Younger, a Roman governor, wrote to Emperor Trajan around AD 112 (Letters 10.96) that Christians met to sing hymns "to Christ as to a god". The Roman biographer Suetonius (Claudius 25.4) mentions unrest in Rome tied to "Chrestus". The Jewish historian Josephus (Antiquities 18 and 20) mentions Jesus and "James, the brother of Jesus"; scholars debate parts of the first passage, but most accept that he wrote about Jesus. Geisler & Turek's point: you can sketch the basic outline of Jesus' life and death from non-Christian sources alone, so the charge that only biased believers told the story doesn't hold up.

How Geisler & Turek build it: they run the New Testament through tests a historian would use for any ancient text: how early, how many copies, how many independent sources, and whether the writers include details that embarrass them. Their phrase for the conclusion is that the writers were telling the truth, and the burden is on anyone who says otherwise to show it.

On the trail: a ranch ledger or a brand registry is more trustworthy when it was written close to the events and there are plenty of copies. The New Testament has been measured by that same yardstick.

The objection

The objection: "Dead men don't rise. The disciples hallucinated, stole the body, or Jesus never really died."

The book's answer

The book starts from facts most historians accept: Jesus died by crucifixion; the tomb was empty; the disciples were convinced they met the risen Jesus; frightened men who had run away became people willing to die for that message; and even Paul, a persecutor, and James, Jesus' skeptical brother, came to believe.

Then it walks through the alternatives. Hallucination: hallucinations happen inside individual minds, so many people seeing the same one at once is hard to accept. Theft: if the disciples stole the body, they suffered and died for what they knew was a lie; people die for what they believe is true, not for what they know is false. Swoon: Roman executioners were professionals at killing, and a half-dead man rolling away the stone and looking like a conqueror of death is hard to picture. Wrong tomb: the authorities could have simply gone to the right tomb and produced the body.

The book concludes that the best explanation of these facts is that Jesus really did rise. In rodeo terms: after the eight seconds, one real Champion got up.

The evidence

1 Corinthians 15:3-8 quotes a short creed listing Jesus' death, burial, resurrection and appearances, including one to more than 500 people at once, "most of whom are still alive". Many scholars think Paul received this creed within a few years of the crucifixion. Roman historian Tacitus and Jewish historian Josephus both mention Jesus' execution under Pontius Pilate.

The details count too. All four Gospels name women as the first witnesses to the empty tomb, in a culture where a woman's testimony carried little legal weight, an odd detail to invent. The disciples went from hiding to preaching in Jerusalem, the one city where the claim was easiest to disprove, and Christian tradition records many of them dying for it. Historian Gary Habermas built his "minimal facts" case on points like these that even most critical scholars accept.

Matthew records that the chief priests asked Pilate to secure the tomb so the disciples couldn't steal the body; the tomb was sealed and a guard posted (Matthew 27:62-66). After the tomb was found empty, the guards were paid to say the disciples had stolen the body while they slept (Matthew 28:11-15). Geisler & Turek note what that story gives away: the opponents didn't claim the body was still in the tomb. Their explanation assumed an empty tomb. And the cover story has its own problem: sleeping guards couldn't know who took the body.

What happened to the witnesses matters too. According to early Christian tradition (not the New Testament itself), Peter was crucified in Rome, upside down at his own request, and James the brother of Jesus was put to death in Jerusalem, as Josephus records. People die for things they wrongly believe are true; it is much harder to see a group suffering for something they knew they had made up.

How Geisler & Turek build it: they line up the facts most historians grant (the death, the empty tomb, the appearances, the change in the disciples and in skeptics like James and Paul) and test each natural explanation against all of them. Their conclusion is that only the resurrection explains every fact at once.

On the trail: when your partners keep saying 'I saw it with my own eyes' even at the cost of their lives, those words aren't cheap. The disciples were exactly that kind of men.

The objection

The objection: "Jesus was a great moral teacher. Calling him God was something the church came up with later."

The book's answer

The book lays out what Jesus says and does in the Gospels. He calls himself the Son of Man, linking himself to the figure in Daniel who comes with the clouds of heaven and receives an everlasting kingdom. He forgives sins, which only God can do. He says "before Abraham was, I am," and his listeners pick up stones for blasphemy. He accepts worship without turning it away.

Against "just a great teacher," the book uses C. S. Lewis's famous point: a man who claims to be God can't be merely a good teacher. He is either lying, out of his mind, or truly Lord, and we have to choose.

Against "made up later," the book notes that the early creeds and letters from point 6 already call Jesus Lord and worship him, and it argues that the resurrection in point 7 is the sign that backs his claim.

The evidence

In Mark 14:61-64, the high priest asks Jesus if he is the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One. Jesus answers "I am" and then describes himself as the Son of Man from Daniel 7 coming with the clouds of heaven. The high priest tears his robes and calls it blasphemy: the people in the room understood what he was claiming.

There are other examples. In Mark 2, Jesus forgives a man's sins, and the onlookers ask who can forgive sins but God alone. In John 8:58 he says "before Abraham was, I am", and the crowd picks up stones. C. S. Lewis summed up the choice: a man who said these things was either lying, out of his mind, or telling the truth. The book argues the first two don't fit the rest of what he taught and did.

How Geisler & Turek build it: they don't start from "the Bible is inspired". They start from the documents as history and ask what Jesus claimed, and then let the resurrection, his own prediction, act as the confirmation of the claim.

On the trail: when a trail boss says 'follow me,' the most important thing is knowing who he is. Who Jesus is turns out to be a fork in the road nobody can skip.

The objection

The objection: "The Bible is a human book full of contradictions, and the powerful decided which books went in."

The book's answer

The book's argument ties the whole trail together. Truth exists. God exists. Miracles are possible. The New Testament is historically reliable. Jesus claimed to be God and showed it by rising from the dead. If so, what Jesus taught is true, and he treated the Old Testament as God's Word and promised his disciples that the Spirit would bring everything back to their minds (John 14:26).

On contradictions, the book argues that most alleged contradictions resolve on a careful reading. Several eyewitnesses telling the same event with different details is normal; if every witness at a police station told the exact same story word for word, you'd suspect they'd gotten together first.

On the canon, the book explains that the early church didn't create the Bible's authority. It recognized books written by apostles and those close to them, books already being read as God's Word. Its conclusion: weighing all this evidence, atheism takes more faith than Christianity, and that's what the title means.

The evidence

The book's last step follows from the previous ones: if Jesus is who he said he was, his view of Scripture carries weight. In Matthew 5:17-18 he says he came not to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfill them, down to the smallest letter, and he quotes the Old Testament as settled authority throughout the Gospels.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, found from 1947 near Qumran, include a near-complete Isaiah scroll about a thousand years older than the previous oldest Hebrew copies. Comparing them showed the text had been copied with remarkable care. The book also points to prophecies like Isaiah 53's suffering servant, written centuries before Jesus, and asks the reader to read it alongside the Gospels and decide for themselves.

How Geisler & Turek build it: the chain is (1) truth exists, (2) God exists, (3) miracles are possible, (4) the New Testament is reliable, (5) Jesus claimed to be God and rose, (6) so what Jesus taught is true, including what he taught about Scripture. Each link is meant to be tested on its own, and the book invites the reader to check every one.

On the trail: walk this whole trail step by step and you're left holding one map. Whether you trust it and ride on is the last step, and the most personal one.